What is False Drop

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has developed three related digital libraries providing access to topical and georeferenced information for coastal and marine science: the Marine Realms Information Bank (MRIB) and its two offshoots, the Monterey Bay Science Digital Library and Coastal Change Hazards Digital Library. These three members of the MRIB family run on the same software and share a common database, but they employ different user interfaces targeting different audiences. This chapter reviews (1) distributed geolibraries, the conceptual foundation for MRIB, (2) the modular software of MRIB, permitting the rapid development of customized user interfaces, and (3) the Electronic Index Card (EIC) Creation Utility, encouraging users to contribute new metadata records to the MRIB database. The accompanying discussion addresses several challenges facing digital library developers: providing for scalability in the system; ensuring interoperability with other systems; and meeting the demands of characterizing information while facilitating its search and retrieval.